Oliver W. Hill, a civil rights lawyer who was at the front of the legal effort that desegregated public schools, has died at age 100. Hill died peacefully Sunday at his home during breakfast, said Joseph Morrissey, a friend of the Hill family.
In 1954, he was part of a series of lawsuits against racially segregated public schools that became the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which set the foundation for integrated education.
In 1940, Hill won his first civil rights case in Virginia, one that required equal pay for black and white teachers. Eight years later, he was the first black elected to Richmond’s City Council since Reconstruction.
A lawsuit argued by Hill in 1951 on behalf of students protesting deplorable conditions at their high school for blacks in Farmville became one of five cases decided under Brown.
Born May 1, 1907, Hill spent much of his childhood in Roanoke. While his parents worked out of town at The Homestead resort, he stayed with the Pentecost family, who taught him about pride in being black.
“Consequently, from childhood I developed personal esteem and expected white folks to treat me like they did one another in such settings,” Hill wrote in his autobiography.
He graduated second in his class from Howard University Law School in 1933, behind his classmate and longtime friend, Thurgood Marshall.
He had recalled that when he started his law career, the court clerks in the building that housed the state Supreme Court of Appeals and law library allowed him to review legal books over weekends with the understanding that he would return them Monday mornings.
Two years ago, that same building was renamed in Hill’s honor. He attended the 2005 building dedication despite ill health, saying in a statement read by his son: “Who would have thought back in 1939, given the racial climate at the time, that 66 years later that building would be named after me.”
Though blind and confined to a wheelchair in recent years, Hill remained active in social and civil rights causes. In 1999, he received the President Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Clinton.
“Mr. Oliver Hill was a remarkable individual whose contributions toward social justice did so much to advance our society,” said L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first elected black governor, a Hill confidant and now mayor of Richmond.
“He was among the vanguard in seeking equal opportunity for all individuals, and he was steadfast in his commitment to effect change. He will be missed.”